"Have we not, in the face of universal dilettantism, the consolation of
possessing, with regard to pain, a professional competence?" asks the
Rumanian philosopher E.M. Cioran, no mean student of suffering himself.
The answer is an emphatic yes, as every publisher's list of
autobiographies proves.

In the crowded presence of such experts, what keeps this remarkable
little confessional from being just one more 3-o'clock-in-the-morning
scream? The events themselves are unexceptional, almost classically
banal as middle-class pain goes. Sarah Ferguson is a poor little rich
English girl, given to pills and a bit too much...